Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [81]
Then, unexpectedly, Miss Vale falls in love with a younger man and seems to change, but not in the way we anticipate. Instead of becoming a “real” woman—warm and sexually receptive to her husband—she becomes a female martyr. Reworking a classic spinster story line, Miss Vale relinquishes her man to the one person on earth she feels for at all, her younger sister. The girl is nineteen or so, an eager, sweet college kid; the hero is thirty-seven. At one point, watching her fiancé and sister dance, remarking on how “young” they seem, she realizes that she has missed the boat or, more appropriately, gotten on the wrong elevator. She lets them go. During the Depression years, she might not have been quite so giving.
In Baby Face (1933), a heartless-woman masterpiece, Barbara Stanwyck, a speakeasy bartender, puts on a decent dress and works her way up within a corporation, starting on the first floor as a filing clerk. We know immediately that she’s an operator. She casually asks a colleague how she got such a great perm. She asks another one where she got the fabulous shoes. She shows up with the perm and identical shoes the next day. Soon she’s headed up the corporate skyscraper. On each new floor (accounting, mortgages, et cetera) she’s transformed: better clothes and hairstyles, an entirely new professional manner. At each stop she lures then abruptly drops at least one ardent lover, although one man she keeps around—a strategist and booster, who’s advised her and helped finance her climb. Finally we see her at the top, draped in one of those sparkly floor-length gowns so many thirties heroines wear just to swish around the house. In this key scene, the lover and friend charges into her office. He needs cash. He’s desperate. And he asks her point-blank for some jewels he once helped her buy. She stares at him. Thinks. And then she delivers a heartless-woman manifesto: “I have to think of myself. I’ve gone through a lot to get those things. My life has been bitter and hard. I’m not like other women. All the gentleness and kindness in me has been killed. All I’ve got is those things. Without them, I’d be nothing…I’d have to go back to what I was! No! I won’t do it, I tell you, I won’t.”
And she doesn’t.
In Dangerous (1935), Bette Davis plays an actress who when refused a divorce, tries to kill her husband by smashing the passenger side of their car, his side, into a tree. (The staged accident was a common heartless-woman maneuver that would be adopted by the overly anxious, neurotic single bitch of the late forties.) To her dismay, the husband lives as a cripple. As a heartless bitch, naturally, she has to leave him, and ruin her own life—retiring from the stage and wandering the city drunk. One evening, a fan spies her out having her liquid supper. He comes over and compliments her, though she alternately ignores him and denies who she is. After much back-and-forth and many drinks, she admits her identity. A romance grows slowly. When he gets too romantic, however, she barks, “Oh, don’t be so intense!” He asks her to marry him. Her response: “Oh, it makes such an issue of everything!” And, as it happens, she’s still married to the man she disfigured. After more drinks and many fights, plus a failed rehab sequence, she goes back to the husband, begrudgingly attempting to act the wife. Let’s put it this way: If the guy could have moved, he would have killed her.
The greatest entry in the heartless-woman genre is Three on a Match (1932). In this bizarre tale, three old school friends meet by chance, each having turned out just as a childhood prologue had predicted. Joan Blondell, recently out of prison for theft, works as a chorus girl. Bette Davis, very young, skinny, and timid, is a stenographer. Elegant Ann Dvorak is